Remote control (RC) ground vehicles and RC aerial vehicles are not new. There are many applications where RC ground and RC aerial vehicles have been employed to fulfill various dull, dirty, or dangerous missions.
Some RC vehicle systems use multiple RC ground and aerial vehicles, and some use a combination of both RC ground and aerial vehicles. In one type of RC ground/aerial system, one or more RC ground vehicles are used for monitoring geographic regions, such as for border surveillance, automation of agriculture operations, and construction operations. The system also uses one or more RC aerial vehicles, which have on-board sensors that extend the perception of the system to an “eye-in-the-sky” vantage point.
Conventional control of RC ground/aerial systems uses one or more human controllers for the RC vehicles. In the system of the preceding paragraph, a human operator receives and uses the perception from the RC aerial vehicle to decide how to influence the RC ground vehicle's movement. Although efforts have been made to make one or more of the unmanned vehicles autonomous, there is always a human in-the-loop, with the human fulfilling key role in perception and navigation of the RC vehicles.